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Those old enough to remember when President Clinton's penis was a big news item will also remember the "Peace Dividend," that the world was going to be able to cash now that that nasty cold war was over. But guess what? Those spies didn't want to come in from the Cold, so while the planet is heating up, the political environment is dropping to sub-zero temperatures. It's deja vu all over again.

On The Beach 2017: The Beckoning of Nuclear Warby John Pilger4 August 2017

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The US submarine captain says, "We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know and there's nothing to be done about it."

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper

These lines from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

Their main aim seems to be war - real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies - the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people." He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom."

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present". Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man - not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system - beckons great danger for all of us.

While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional".

A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin - anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China's economic lifelines.

The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required", he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute's fiction.

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 - during the Cuban missile crisis - he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded - but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down".

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 - the year Shute wrote On the Beach - no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world's most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America's modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America's longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings - murder - by drones.

In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs - three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama - with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side - who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief".

One of Obama's last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618 billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.

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Today, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill that would fortify existing sanctions on Russia and add new restrictions. If the bill becomes law, it would mark the most significant step taken by Congress on Russia policy in recent history. Though not perfect, the bill would substantially strengthen the West’s negotiating position vis-à-vis Russia on the conflict in Ukraine and send a strong message to Moscow that efforts to undermine US elections carry costly consequences.

In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifer’s top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting. “It’s clear,” another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.”...

The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many....

In effect, the new forensic evidence considered here lands in a vacuum. We now enter a period when an official reply should be forthcoming. What the forensic people are now producing constitutes evidence, however one may view it, and it is the first scientifically derived evidence we have into any of the events in which Russia has been implicated. The investigators deserve a response, the betrayed professionals who formed VIPS as the WMD scandal unfolded in 2003 deserve it, and so do the rest of us. The cost of duplicity has rarely been so high.

It is not yet a sure thing that the bill will become law. While the legislation has bipartisan support in the Senate, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled on June 13 that the Trump administration might oppose it. The White House’s opposition could give House Republicans cold feet about voting on the bill.

But for now, it is worth examining the contents of the bill and explaining what it would mean for US policy toward Russia.

1. The bill locks in existing US sanctions against Russia and gives Congress a check on the president’s ability to lift sanctions.

The most basic element of the bill is that it codifies existing US sanctions against Russia—including three executive orders tied to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, one tied explicitly to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and two tied to malicious cyber activities. Absent such codification, President Donald Trump could terminate US sanctions against Russia with the stroke of a pen. By codifying the executive orders, the bill constrains the executive branch’s ability to remove any of the sanctions currently in place.

Moreover, the bill spells out what the president must do in order to remove sanctions: submit a report to Congress explaining the rationale, including what the United States expects to receive in return. Within thirty days of the submission of such a report (sixty if it is submitted during summer), Congress can approve or reject the president’s decision to remove sanctions.

By itself, this measure greatly strengthens US policy toward Russia. On Ukraine, it will give America’s sanctions partners (the European Union, Japan, Canada, and several others) confidence that Trump will not unilaterally back away from sanctions—which, in turn, will make it less likely that America’s partners will remove sanctions. Equally important, the provision will give Moscow clarity about America’s position: the United States will maintain sanctions until Russia changes the behavior that led to the imposition of sanctions in the first place.

2. The bill significantly expands US sanctions on Russia’s energy sector. If implemented proactively, it would cut off Russia’s hopes for developing its next-generation oil resources.

Current sanctions prohibit Western companies from providing goods or services to next-generation oil projects in Russia: specifically, Arctic offshore, deepwater, and shale projects. The bill expands US restrictions in two important ways. First, it brings projects in which Russian companies are involved—regardless of where they are located—under the purview of sanctions. That means Russian companies will be denied the opportunity to amass expertise in advanced drilling techniques by learning from Western partners.

Second, the bill requires the executive branch to impose sanctions on foreign firms that make significant investments in next-generation Russian oil projects. This provision—a classic case of secondary sanctions—will discourage companies around the world from investing in Arctic offshore, deepwater, and shale oil projects in Russia, diminishing the risk that lost US business will be backfilled by foreign competitors.

Taken together, the energy sanctions in the bill will likely block Russia’s development of next-generation oil resources, which can take many years to develop, for as long as the sanctions are in place. For Russia’s oil-dependent economy, this is a big deal.

3. The strongest sanctions in the bill concern transactions with Russia’s intelligence and defense sectors. These measures are the bill’s most important counterpunch against Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election.

As a response to Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, the bill includes a number of sanctions that make sense thematically but will likely have minimal economic impact. But it does include one provision that packs a major economic punch: mandatory sanctions on any “person” (i.e., individual or entity) “that engages in a significant transaction with a person that is part of, or operates for or on behalf of, the defense or intelligence sectors of the Government of the Russian Federation.” If the Treasury Department implements this provision aggressively, it will amount to a threat of secondary sanctions against any company around the world that buys substantial arms from Russia (which, as of 2016, accounted for roughly 8 percent of arms sales globally).

With Russia investing heavily in arms while it increasingly uses its military to defy international norms, it behooves the US government to take steps to impede the development of Russia’s military capabilities. This provision, therefore, not only represents the muscle of the bill on cyber deterrence but also advances strategic objectives by hindering Russia’s military modernization and incentivizing foreign militaries to diversify away from Russian arms purchases.

4. The bill includes an optional tool that could help the US government impede Nord Stream II—and enhance European energy security—if the White House decides to use it.

While most sanctions in the Senate bill are mandatory, one important measure is discretionary: sanctions on investment in the construction of Russian energy export pipelines. If the Treasury Department opts to use this provision aggressively, it could threaten sanctions against any company that makes a significant investment in Nord Stream II, the controversial gas pipeline that would connect Russia to Germany by way of the Baltic Sea. And if Treasury were to levy such threats credibly, the parties involved in Nord Stream II may well decide it is too risky to proceed with the project.

This would be a big deal, as it would scupper Russia’s efforts to deliver gas to Europe while bypassing Ukraine, and it would help the EU diversify away from Russian energy. It could also be a boon for American companies seeking to export liquefied natural gas to Europe.

5. Other sanctions in the bill are mostly symbolic.

Under current sanctions, American financial institutions cannot provide credit to the six largest Russian banks with maturity of thirty days or more. The bill tightens the debt maturity threshold to fourteen days. While the symbolism is clear—sanctions are tightening and inching closer to blacklisting the Russian banks entirely—it is doubtful such a move will have significant practical impact. Other measures included in the bill, such as sanctions on the corrupt privatization of state-owned Russian assets, are difficult to judge in terms of projected impact.

6. This bill sounds great—what’s the catch?

There are several loopholes in the bill. One obvious loophole is in sanctions on investments in next-generation Russian oil projects. The text of the bill allows the White House to opt not to impose the sanctions if “the president determines that it is not in the national interest of the United States to do so.” While waiver authority is necessary, the provision would be improved if it required a report to Congress each time the president decides not to penalize a worthy target. Thankfully, the strongest provision in the bill—which restricts transactions with Russia’s intelligence and defense sectors—includes a waiver that mandates Congressional notification.

Other quibbles with the bill are minor. The bill requires several reports from the executive branch, including a study on the potential impact of a ban on dealing in Russian sovereign debt. Reports, unfortunately, can suck up precious staff time that is better spent enforcing sanctions proactively. The bill would be much stronger—and more effective—if it simply imposed restrictions on dealing in Russian sovereign debt.

Nevertheless, senators on both sides of the aisle deserve much credit for designing legislation that will clearly advance US interests.

7. Keep your eyes on the EU’s reaction.

Had Congress passed such a bill during the Obama administration, the EU would have opposed it vocally. That’s because the bill alters certain sanctions that were initially negotiated multilaterally, without giving the EU or others a chance to weigh in. Moreover, because of the reach of the US financial system, European firms will likely comply with the new American sanctions whether or not their governments approve. And of course, the bill includes a number of secondary sanctions—which no foreign government likes.

In ordinary times, France could be expected to oppose the bill as a unilateral use of American power. But having been victimized by brazen Russian cyberattacks during his own campaign, President Emmanuel Macron may be tempted to support it—or at least to remain quiet. The same is true for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who may view the legislation as an opportunity to reestablish a degree of transatlantic unity on Russia policy.

The head of the French government’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.

In an interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard said the Macron campaign hack “was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone.”

He said they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible.

Poupard is director general of the government cyber-defense agency known in France by its acronym, ANSSI. Its experts were immediately dispatched when documents stolen from the Macron campaign leaked online on May 5 in the closing hours of the presidential race.

Poupard says the attack’s simplicity “means that we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country.”

Regardless, Secretary Tillerson and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin would be wise to send envoys to Europe to try to persuade US allies to sign on to similar sanctions. The West’s leverage in negotiations with the Kremlin is strongest when America and the EU project a united front.

8. What does the bill mean for broader US policy toward Russia?

One interesting hypothetical is what will happen if the bill becomes law but the Trump administration is apathetic about enforcing it. Such a move would muddle US policy toward Russia. After all, sanctions are only as useful as the policies they are meant to advance. But the executive branch will be required by law to implement most provisions in the bill, and the Treasury Department will take its legal obligations seriously.

Even if Trump persists in his pro-Russia rhetoric, the bill will provide much-needed clarity to US policy toward Russia. It will end worried speculation about the White House’s intentions on sanctions, and it will indicate once and for all that America remains committed to combating Russian aggression. That the US Senate was able to pass such a significant piece of legislation during a time of intense partisan division is no small achievement.

Edward Fishman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as the Russia and Europe Lead in the State Department’s Office of Sanctions Policy during the Obama administration. He tweets @edwardfishman.